Back together again

Oh crap, it's happened again. My Genius Idea sat and festered too long before I wrote it down, and now it's gone all moldy and pretentious and no longer useful for anything but rearranging furniture in my head. Oh, well, it was getting a little stale in there anyway.

Instead I want to talk about how much better I feel about the world now that I've got my kitchen under control again. From the middle of July, when I tore the ligament in my foot, until just a couple of weeks ago when I got stable enough to stand for the length of time it takes to make dinner, my roommate had to deal with the kitchen. And I love my roommate dearly, but she is not a kitchen person. She knows it, and it shows. She doesn't particularly like to cook (although she's better at it than she thinks), and she has an even harder time keeping up with the even-less-fun kitchen things, like dishes. (Let's not talk about the state of the refrigerator, shall we?)

I've always thought of the kitchen as the heart of a home. When I was growing up, we didn't use the front hall entrance to our house but the kitchen door, so coming home always meant walking into the kitchen. It was where I got to spend the most time with my mom, who worked until she got too sick to keep working, helping her make dinner (although my most vivid memories are still of baking Christmas cookies, her absolute favorite). It's still where we spend the most time together, when I go to visit for holidays. And in my current apartment, the kitchen is literally the physical center of the space. I step out of my bedroom in the morning straight into the kitchen (and over to the coffee pot).

And yeah, it's still a strain to stand for an hour to cook or bake. But I've finally got the dish situation under control, and I've consolidated recipe boxes with the one I inherited from my grandmother earlier this year. Friday night I made Korean barbequed beef and gai lan for dinner, and last night was this year's inaugural Teresa Neilsen Hayden Savory Pie. (The leeks were a little bland, but the next one will be better.) And now the world seems to have sorted itself out into its proper place again. I must be more of a kitchen witch than I'd thought.